The best way to learn how to program is to do something useful,
so this introduction to Python is built around a common scientific task:
data analysis.

Arthritis Inflammation

We are studying inflammation in patients who have been given a new treatment for arthritis, and
need to analyze the first dozen data sets of their daily inflammation. The data sets are stored in
comma-separated values (CSV) format:

Each number represents the number of inflammation bouts that a particular patient experienced on a
given day. For example, value “6” at row 3 column 7 of the data set above means that the third
patient was experiencing inflammation six times on the seventh day of the clinical study.

So, we want to:

Calculate the average inflammation per day across all patients.

Plot the result to discuss and share with colleagues.

To do all that, we’ll have to learn a little bit about programming.

Prerequisites

You need to understand the concepts of files and directories and how to start a Python
interpreter before tackling this lesson. This lesson sometimes references Jupyter
Notebook although you can use any Python interpreter mentioned in the Setup.

The commands in this lesson pertain to Python 3.

Getting Started

To get started, follow the directions on the “Setup” page to download data
and install a Python interpreter.